Grenouille's birth

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille enters the world on 17 July 1738 in the most putrid spot in the whole kingdom: the Cimetière des Innocents in Paris, where for eight hundred years the dead had been carted and tossed into long ditches, stacking bone upon bone. The heat of that day lay leaden upon the graveyard, squeezing its putrefying vapour—a blend of rotting melon and fetid burnt animal horn—into the nearby alleys. It is a birth that immediately marks him as an abomination, setting the course for a life defined by his extraordinary olfactory gifts and his utter lack of human scent.

The Setting: A World of Stench

In eighteenth-century France, the cities reeked with a stench barely conceivable to modern sensibilities. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells of mouldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat. The stench of sulphur rose from chimneys, caustic lyes from tanneries, and congealed blood from slaughterhouses. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes, rotting teeth, and rancid cheese. The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank—even the King himself stank like a rank lion, and the Queen like an old goat, summer and winter. In the eighteenth century there was nothing to hinder bacteria busy at decomposition, and so no human activity was unaccompanied by stench. The stench was foulest in Paris, the largest city of France, and the most fiendish spot within Paris was the Cimetière des Innocents, between the rue aux Fers and the rue de la Ferronnerie. It was here, on this most putrid spot, that Grenouille was born.

The Birth and the Mother's Fate

Grenouille's mother, a young woman barely in her mid-twenties, was standing at a fish stall in the rue aux Fers, scaling whiting that she had just gutted, when the labour pains began. The fish, ostensibly taken that very morning from the Seine, already stank so vilely that the smell masked the odour of corpses. Her sense of smell had been utterly dulled, and her belly hurt, deadening all susceptibility to sensate impressions. She only wanted the pain to stop, to put this revolting birth behind her as quickly as possible. It was her fifth birth; she had effected all the others here at the fish booth, and all had been stillbirths or semi-stillbirths—the bloody meat that emerged had not differed greatly from the fish guts that lay there already, nor had lived much longer. She expected the same today. When the final contractions began, she squatted down under the gutting table and gave birth, cutting the newborn thing's umbilical cord with her gutting knife. Then, on account of the heat and the stench—which she perceived only as an unbearable, numbing something, like a field of lilies or a small room filled with too many narcissi—she grew faint, toppled to one side, fell out from under the table into the street, and lay there knife in hand. A crowd gathered, someone hailed the police. When questioned, she claimed the blood on her skirt came from the fish. But then the infant under the gutting table began to squall. Beneath a swarm of flies and amid the offal and fish heads, they discovered the newborn child. They pulled it out. As prescribed by law, they gave it to a wet nurse and arrested the mother. She confessed, openly admitting that she would definitely have let the thing perish as she had with the other four, and was tried, found guilty of multiple infanticide, and a few weeks later decapitated at the Place de Grève.

The Infant's Early Journey

The child had already changed wet nurses three times before his mother's execution. No one wanted to keep it for more than a couple of days. It was too greedy, they said, sucking as much as two babies, depriving the other sucklings of milk and the wet nurses of their livelihood. The police officer in charge, a man named La Fosse, wearied of the matter and wanted to have the child sent to a halfway house for foundlings and orphans at the far end of the rue Saint-Antoine, from which transports of children were dispatched daily to the great public orphanage in Rouen. But bureaucratic and administrative difficulties—the babe had neither been baptized nor received a name to inscribe on the certificate of transport—led La Fosse to revoke his decision. He gave instructions for the boy to be handed over to some ecclesiastical institution, where they could baptize him and decide his further fate. He got rid of him at the cloister of Saint-Merri in the rue Saint-Martin. There they baptized him with the name Jean-Baptiste. Because the prior was in a good mood and the eleemosynary fund not yet exhausted, they pampered him at the cloister's expense, giving him to a wet nurse named Jeanne Bussie who lived in the rue Saint-Denis, to receive three francs per week for her trouble.

The Wet Nurse's Complaint

A few weeks later, Jeanne Bussie stood at the gates of the cloister of Saint-Merri with her market basket and declared to Father Terrier that she would not keep the child. She claimed he had pumped her dry down to the bones, and that he would gobble up anything. But her deeper complaint was that the child did not smell. She said, "He doesn't smell at all." When pressed, she explained that babies should smell good—their feet like fresh butter, their bodies like a pancake soaked in milk, and the back of their heads like caramel. But this bastard had no smell at all, even less than cold air. She was convinced he was possessed by the devil. Father Terrier, an educated man who despised superstition, argued that an infant could not be possessed, and that the child's lack of smell was a sign of health. But when he himself lifted the basket and sniffed, he could smell nothing. The wet nurse was discharged, and Terrier, after a disturbing encounter with the infant's probing nose, quickly handed the child over to Madame Gaillard, a woman who took children to board no matter of what age or sort, paying a year in advance, and fled back to the cloister, washing himself from head to foot and crossing himself repeatedly before falling asleep.